A Good Find

I stopped by a used bookstore called the Book Stop near my office at lunch today. A tall blond woman offered to help me navigate their tightly-packed, sparsely-labeled shelves, which I needed. I requested political books, mysteries, sci-fis, classics, and a fantasy book: a wide arrange of genres. She told me something about each author I named, as though they were all acquaintances of hers. When I asked for Evelyn Waugh, she even drew in a breath, then quietly retrieved it.

The world would be a lot more fun to live in if every worker was so devoted to his craft.

I picked up 7 books, 2 of them hard-back, and paid $20. I hadn't even gotten started going through my list of books to buy. If this bookstore had more square footage, it would be perfect. As it is, it looks under 500 square feet, and a healthy portion of that is dedicated to romances, which doesn't do anything for me.

I bought the only Kurt Vonnegut Jr book they had (it was $1) - but the girly artwork on the cover, the silly title ("The sirens of Titan") and the description by wikipedia ("A comic scifi") makes me worry about it's quality. Yet it was nominated for a Hugo award - are those easy to get?

Reading a lot of bad books lately

If you ever look at my audio book review list, you know I flag new reviews with an 'N'.

I just noticed the booklist has a glut of new books (six) that scored at the bottom 10% of the list. This is disappointing. I must be choosing a lot of bad books lately.

Picking audiobooks is a mixed affair - there's a limited selection available, so you can't always get that gem you want to read. However, the cost of recording a book is high enough that only popular books will ever be recorded, guaranteeing some amount of quality.

Trying Blogging Again

My first shot at blogging was more about writing my own blogging tool (and getting some perl practice) than it was about communication. My tool worked fine and did it's job, but I stopped using it when I realized I just didn't have that much to say.

I'm going to try again - this time with someone else's tool (google/blogger), and this time to use it for it's intended purpose.

If I can convert the archive of those 2 years of posts into a blogger friendly format, I'll retroactively apply them here.

In the meantime, here's a handy place for me to broadcast ideas for those of you who care to read.